Most keyowrd databases consist of a small sample of the overall search universe. This means keyword databases tend to skew more toward commercial terms and the core/head industry terms, with slighlty less coverage of the midtail terms. Many rarely searched for longtail terms are not covered due to database size limitations & lack of commercial data around those terms. Plus if those terms were covered, there would be large sampling errors. Google generates over 2 trillion searches per year and claims 15% of their searches are unique. This means they generate searches for over 300 billion unique keywords each year. The good news about limited tail coverage is it means most any keyword we return data on is a keyword with some commercial value to it. And with Google's Rankbrain algorithm, if you rank well on core industry terms then your pages will often tend to rank well for other related tail keywords.
As you can see, LongTailPro is pulling data from Google Adwords. WHAT?! So LTP uses a mix of their own massive data (launched in 2011) and data pulled via API from Majestic.com, Moz.com, and Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com). Once you input your seed keywords, LongTailPro outputs suggested keywords related to your seed keywords, search volume, Adwords suggested bid, Adwords competition, total words, rank value, average keyword competition, language searched, and location searched.
I love Moz’s interface and how they give you data on the keywords. It’s easy-to-read, making it an ideal solution for both experts and newbies alike. They’ll show you both numeric and visual representations of a keyword’s monthly search volume, its opportunity for ranking, priority, and difficulty. They’ll also show you keyword suggestions and SERP analysis, which is fantastic and detailed.
The cost is only a one time payment…no monthly fees, which is fantastic if you’re on a budget, and you get lifetime updates and some truly excellent training videos as well as some very useful built-in tools. I’ve also tried other paid keyword tools such as Market Samurai, Wordtracker, Jaaxy, and others, and let me tell you this….none of them come close to Keyword Researcher Pro for value and ease of use.

The reason I sometimes use this facility with the GKP is to find volume amounts for the keywords I’ve chosen. But, these days, it’s not so important. As long as the Long Tail Keyword makes sense and is something I would put into a search engine, then it’s good enough. Sometimes the most blazingly obvious keywords are often over looked by eager, trying-to-be-clever marketers. Sometimes you need a tool to highlight them.

This tool was originally created to carry out keyword research for paid campaigns using Google's AdWords platform. However, it can also be used to research organic keywords, providing estimated global/local monthly search volumes for keywords (i.e. their popularity) and their competition (i.e. how difficult they are to rank for) for organic search.
I will use the tool to pull in a lot of keywords related to a theme and group them into relevant topics. These topics will either become their own content page or will be combined with other topics to create a page. KeywordTool.io is similar to other tools out there such as Uber Suggest, which I've used for a long time, but it tends to produce more keywords and it provides search volume for the keywords.
I think people's aresenal of keyword research tools are mostly the same: 1) You need a tool to examine search volume, most likely Google Keyword Planner 2) A tool to help you generate more keyword ideas. Tools that work with the search engines' autosuggestions are very popular such as KeywordTool.io and Ubersuggest 3) Then people might add a tool broaden the depth of their data, maybe including something like Google Trends or Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool.
The developer of the program Spencer has even modified the program to make it better and faster. Recently, a platinum edition of the software was released. This was to help webmasters in their internet efforts. The new version simplifies the competition process, because it allows its users to store their favorite keywords and get them anytime they need them. Moreover, the newer version makes it easier for its user to track their website ranking in all the search engines.
If you're a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they're the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas -- what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? If you were a company like HubSpot, for example -- selling marketing software (which happens to have some awesome SEO tools ... but I digress ;-) -- you might have general topic buckets like "inbound marketing," "blogging," "email marketing," "lead generation," "SEO," "social media," "marketing analytics," and "marketing automation."
The link back to googles API is crap – it keeps coming up with password authentication which renders it virtually useless when trying to find your own rank. Sells you the software initially. But then tries to sell you a load of stuff afterwards which effectively tells you the first version you have already paid for is useless without the extra “bonuses”. Not a nice way of doing business
Great Top 10 keyword research tools list. Thank you for posting Robbie! I really appreciated the feedback from the experts. There are a definitely a few tools here worthy of taking note of. I have also been using DYNO Mapper (http://www.dynomapper.com) as a keyword research tool. DYNO Mapper is a visual sitemap generator that delivers keywords on all pages of any site. The user simply inputs any existing URL into the system and it will scan thousands of pages.
The link back to googles API is crap – it keeps coming up with password authentication which renders it virtually useless when trying to find your own rank. Sells you the software initially. But then tries to sell you a load of stuff afterwards which effectively tells you the first version you have already paid for is useless without the extra “bonuses”. Not a nice way of doing business
After the Panda update rolled out, the latent risk in such a strategy could (typically would) vastly exceed the direct cost of the content, as poor pages on one part of a site could drag down the ranking of other pages on the site which targeted different keywords. Some sites have seen their search traffic fall over 90% with their ad revenues falling even faster. Demand Media went from being worth a couple billion to tens of millions of Dollars. ArticlesBase.com sold on Flippa for $80,000, but was making over $500,000 PER MONTH in profit before getting hit by Panda. Many other Panda-torched sites like Suite101 have simply went offline.
I just have the free version right now so I don't know all that the pro one can do. But even the free version has A LOT of tools you can use, I haven't even figured them all out yet. But one that I have used is their Content Optimizer. You can take a new or existing content piece of yours, and compare it to one of your competitor's pieces on a similar topic, and see where you might be lacking based on the keywords that are used in each piece.
I also want to emphasize that Microsoft Excel and Google Docs perhaps play an equal, if not more important role in keyword research than any of these tools, because at the end of the day, the mountain of data you end up with is of no use if you can’t perform calculations, sort, filter, present or store it in a way that’s best suits the task at hand. Head over to Distilled for a comprehensive Excel for SEOs guide. Alternatively, bug this guy—he’s the Sensei who trains Excel ninjas in the dark of the night.
I’d give Long Tail Pro a 4.5/5 stars for its’ ease of use, ability to generate a high number of long tail keyword searches of low to medium competition, check rankings and check Top 10 competition on any keyword search as to what the results of number of backlinks, domain authority/page authority and other pertinent ranking data from Moz.com’s api.
Long tail keywords can find people who are later in the buying cycle, and more ready to buy. For example, somebody searching for “tents” is probably early in the buying cycle, just starting to research what they want. Whereas somebody who searches for “North Face Kaiju 4 person tent” already knows what they want, and is more likely to be ready to buy.
Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to find new and related keywords, but ignore the search volume data! The search volume data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that you’re actually spending money to advertise on. Otherwise, these volumes are not reliable. While not really helpful to decide which keyword is most used by your potential audience, Google Adwords Keyword Planner makes a useful tool in coming up with ideas for potential keywords!
The experts love SEMrush, but will you? Take the tool for a test drive and decide for yourself. For a limited time I'm giving all my readers an exclusive one month free access to SEMrush PRO. You'll get unrestricted access to all the tool's features. If you decide SEMrush is not for you, cancel anytime during the one month trial and you won't be charged a penny.
What I really like about them is extensive detail including the keyword difficulty. Ahrefs uses clickstream data to also show how many clicks you will get from the search engine. This is very useful after knowledge graph integration, as many keywords may have huge traffic but they hardly get any clicks from the search engine. Reason being, they get answers directly from the Google search result. Example of one such query is: “birthdate of any celebrity”
It’s very easy to use, fast and smooth and gives you tons of Long Tail Keywords. You only pay for the web based software once, so there are never any monthly fees. I’ve also been impressed over the years at how easy it is to update. These updates are free and the creator (Clever Gizmos) is always moving with the ever changing world of SEO and updated API’s to keep his program up to speed and fresh.

This might be the easiest way to make Long Tail Pro pay for itself. I’m pretty sure that the affiliate program is open to anybody (even if you don’t currently own the product). Simply get signed up and then promote it any way you see fit (within the Terms of Service, of course). If you couldn’t tell, I’ve been doing this for quite awhile via this blog and I’ve earned a healthy sum of money over the years as a result.

Answer: Google Keyword Planner was created to find keywords for Google ads. It will likely not produce very good keyword suggestions for SEO or content marketing purposes. Google Keyword Planner often hides good long tail keywords. To find long tail keywords for SEO, you can use Keyword Planner alternatives such as Google Trends, Google Suggest or Keyword Tool.

This keyword research tool is effective, automatically providing you with keyword suggestions that other sites haven’t necessarily turned up (which it’s intended to do), along with their search volume, CPC, and Adwords competition. In order to get any actual information about the keywords, though, you need to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro (which is a little misleading on the site copy). This plan is $88 a month, and if you’re just doing keyword research for Google, I’d recommend choosing one of the other tools for the price.

Customize the data that LTP is going to fetch with pre-filters like “Suggested Bid” (or Cost per Click [CPC], i.e. the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on their AdWords ad that is targeting that specific keyword), “Local Search Volume” (average number of monthly searches for a specific keyword), “Advertiser Competition” (the amount of advertisers competing for a specific keyword) and “Number (of) Words” (very important when you’re trying to find long-tail keywords).
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Usually, the various search engines provide their own keyword suggestion tools, which also include the number of searches for each of those keywords. The keyword researcher uses this information to select the correct keyword, depending on the SEO goals of the website. Around 20–25% of searches are very specific long tail keywords entered into Google every single day. It's easy to rank said keywords when there is the right amount of content and backlinks to match. Keyword research is a valuable and high return activity in the search marketing field.[citation needed]
The Google Keyword Tool has a variety of helpful features meant to streamline the keyword research process. By entering terms or phrases into the search box, the Keyword Tool allows you to build extensive, relevant keyword lists from one simple interface. By default, the tool displays Advertising Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends for each keyword. Additional options allow marketers to show the estimated Average Cost per Click, Ad share, and Search Share.
It arranges your search volume by separating the relevant keywords from those considered irrelevant. It presents those keywords, which it believes would help rank your search engine very high. Once you indicate that you want your keywords to be filtered, the tool would help to arrange that. You know that is very important for your Adsense and adwords campaign. The program is relevant for your CPC and other internet marketing strategies that you want to use.
But if you’re serious about content and inbound marketing, and you want to create great industry-related blog posts that lead to more traffic, leads, and sales–then you should at least give it a test drive (assuming you need content ideas). Like I said, it comes with an excellent guarantee, and you can visit the site here or click the image below to watch more videos regarding this impressive tool.
This is slightly more complicated than it used to be, because you have to actually create a live AdWords Campaign as part of the process! This puts many people off, as it looks as if you have to actually advertise in order to use the tool. You don’t — you can just setup the campaign and then pause it before it runs so you don’t have to spend a penny.
He is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
This tool was originally created to carry out keyword research for paid campaigns using Google's AdWords platform. However, it can also be used to research organic keywords, providing estimated global/local monthly search volumes for keywords (i.e. their popularity) and their competition (i.e. how difficult they are to rank for) for organic search.
Google Adwords search volume tool is highly effective and extremely easy to use. If you’re new to keyword research and just want some quick info on the search volume and competition level of a few keywords you have in mind, this is a great tool to use. Just enter in the specific keywords that you want to compare, and then view the results. You’ll be able to see the search volume, general competition level, and suggested Adwords bid.
1) Ahrefs to quickly see “the big picture” when it comes to any keyword I'm researching. I can instantly see the top holders in the SERPs. I then immediately take the top holders list and go check out their sites. I need to make sure I can beat them content-wise, otherwise I will search for another keyword to try and rank for, or perhaps go down the long-tail route. The Ahrefs tool and data quality get better and better every year. It's one of my favorite tools.

3. Finally, there's just good old research through trends and news. Google Trends, keeping up on industry news of the business, and even newsjacking (if there are relevant topics). These all require different resources depending on the business, but once you find the leaders in their news you can not only leverage them for keyword research but also glean insights into how you can become an industry leader yourself (and dominate SEO).

KW Finder is similar to the Google Adwords tool; it even pulls up similar results, which aren’t as entirely on-point as the immediate results from SEMrush and Moz. From my experience with KW Finder, the searches are a lot better if you put some time into manually adding in filters like negative keywords and additional keywords you do want to include.
When I finally made the decision the get Long Tail Pro way back in December of 2012 – I honestly had no idea how much this one piece of software would impact everything I do online. I knew that it would help me find more and better keywords right off the bat. But I didn’t know exactly how much it would positively affect my ability to actually make money online. I can say with confidence, that Long Tail Pro is the one tool that has made the biggest difference (by far), in my ability to get traffic to websites and actually earn money online.